"As some people noticed, I got distracted ("Ooh, look, a squirrel..") and never wrote an announcement for -rc7. My bad. But it wasn't actually all that interesting a release apart from the date, and it had a silly compile error in ohci-pci if you hadn't enabled CONFIG_PM_RUNTIME, so we'll just forget -rc7 ever happened, ok?

Instead, go and get the real 3.11 release, which is out there, all shiny and ready to be compiled and loved. Since rc7 (ok, I lied, it happened) there's been just small fixes. Most of them came in from the networking tree, but there's some all over: some random filesystem fixes, a couple of sound fixes, a /proc/timer_list fix, things like that. Nothing really stands out (unless you happened to use the new soft-dirty code, that had a buglet that could really hurt), but let's hope we don't have some silly configuration that doesn't even compile this time around."

2)Kubuntu Gets Commercial Support

Though Mark Shuttleworth no longer wanted to support the KDE variant of Ubuntu known as Kubuntu, other do. In particular, Kubuntu now has commercial support from a company called Emerge Open.

"If you are a company, organization or individual who needs the reassurance of a phone number you can call to get help this service is for you," Kubuntu's release stated. "Pricing is very competitive and can be purchased in a one off block or a number of hours per month."

One hour of support time is currently listed at costing 80 pounds (pricing is listed in UK Sterling).

3) Linux Foundation Gets Into Biology

"All of us are smarter collectively than any one of us is by ourselves, and Linux is one of the greatest examples of that principle. We are able to take what we know about Linux and collaborative development and transfer that to new industries,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation in a statement. "OpenBEL represents an amazing opportunity for openness and collaboration to advance science, and we’re happy to impart our knowledge of collaborative software development to leaders in the life sciences industry. Successful open source projects don’t just host code; they make use of a full suite of open source best practices to quickly gain adoption and collaboration. We aim to help OpenBEL achieve even more success."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at LinuxPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist